All my life, I have felt destiny tugging at my sleeve.~ Thursday NextI don't want to "go with the flow". The flow just washes you down the drain. I want to fight the flow.- Henry RollinsAll this spiritual talk is great and everything...but at the end of the day, there's nothing like a pair of skinny jeans. - Jillian Michaels

I'm not a Western fan either, but that might change if there were as many competent writers in that genre as there are in others.

You mention three notable Western writers, drnick, I'd be hard pressed to name 5 altogether. Of those three, Zane Grey reads head and shoulders above the others IMO.

I recommend you check out Elmore Leonard if you haven't already, he probably has a dozen or so, and he crafts a good tale regardless of which genre he's dealing with. I'd recommend trying out Valdez is coming if you haven't already read it, then revisiting the all but forgotten Burt Lancaster flick.

I'm backing up AJane. Lonesome Dove is a masterpiece and I can't recommend it enough to anyone who enjoys reading. McMurtry has other novels that have a western theme, but none of them can touch Lonesome Dove. In fact, Lonesome Dove had a couple sequels and one prequel. The two sequels are Streets of Laredo and Comanche Moon and the prequel is Dead Man's Walk. I liked all three of those, but again, they are not the jewel that is Lonesome Dove. Other books by McMurtry with a western theme are: the Berrybender series of books which include Sin Killer, The Wandering Hill, By Sorrow's River and Folly and Glory. Then there's Horseman, Pass by which the movie Hud was based on, Anything for Billy based on Billy the Kid, Buffalo Girls in which Calamity Jane and Buffalo Bill Cody appear, Zeke and Ned is the story of Ezekiel Proctor and Ned Christie, the last Cherokee warriors, Boone's Lick, and then he has several non-fiction works covering western times.

I've read all of his fiction works covering the west and enjoyed them. He has a knack for adding a little humor to his writing, and I love that. As you can see, I'm a huge McMurtry fan!

Re: Westerns

I just finished a doozy of a western/thriller titled 'Incident At Twenty-Mile' by Trevanian. I don't believe he's written any other westerns, considering that he wrote this one, maybe he doesn't have to.

Highly superior, with some truly scary and/or evil examples of humanity. And those are the innocent bystanders. Just barely joking I am.

On the back cover, a blurb review from the NYTimes' Christopher Lehmann-Haupt states {in part} "You can't help thinking of Hannibal Lecter at the start of Trevanian's new novel..."

He may have been thinking of another scary character than I, and I wasn't thinking Hannibal Lecter, but I did find myself muttering 'Kill him. KILL HIM while you still can.'

Set in an isolated mining town straddling ghost town status in 1880's Wyoming, there aren't any cowboys and such, but it is populated by decidingly memorable characters.